First, with a HT to Bookworm Room, we have this strange report from a soon to be fired AP reporter (fired for reporting the truth, as opposed to Obama positive spin straight from a unicorn fart):
It’s a good thing Sonia Sotomayor speaks Sotomayoran.
After week upon week in which plenty of other people on the planet interpreted Sotomayor’s past comments, the Supreme Court nominee at last got a chance to deconstruct her own words Tuesday before the Senate Judiciary Committee.
Fingers splayed, palms flat, hands bouncing up and then deliberately pressing down to the table, Sotomayor elaborated, clarified, expanded, retracted.
She drew loopy circles on her paper; she ran rhetorical circles around her past words.
“I didn’t intend to suggest …” she explained.
“What I was speaking about …” she offered.
“As I have tried to explain …” she parsed.
“I wasn’t talking about …” she demurred.
She was a tough critic at times.
“I was using a rhetorical flourish that fell flat,” she averred.
“It was bad,” she said. Of her own words.
Check out the whole thing. The pool on the date for this reporter's axing is heating up in the WMD offices. Must crush that dissent whenever possible....
And, there may be a case for the charge of dishonesty in Sappy Sonia. Jennifer Rubin writes:
she came before the Senate Judiciary Committee and began to tell one “jaw-dropper” (as a U.S. senator labeled one of her answers) after another, raising doubts about her credibility.
And it is not just conservatives who are disturbed. The Washington Post’s Eva Rodriguez, who had touted Sotomayor’s nomination, wrote: “I’m surprised and disturbed by how many times today Sonia Sotomayor has backed off of or provided less-than-convincing explanations for some of her more controversial speeches about the role of gender and ethnicity in judicial decision-making.” Indeed, that this the question of the moment: is Sotomayor being honest with the Senate?
Ouch. Guess the Barry didn't give her enough pimp juice to allow her to float through. Maybe they need to get the unicorns to fart more, because even the Left is not impressed:
From the Left, liberal law professor Louis Michael Seidman called her out for pretending to believe in something no liberal in good standing does: the ability of judges to apply the law to the facts before them. He decried her hypocrisy:
I was completely disgusted by Judge Sotomayor’s testimony today. If she was not perjuring herself, she is intellectually unqualified to be on the Supreme Court. If she was perjuring herself, she is morally unqualified. How could someone who has been on the bench for seventeen years possibly believe that judging in hard cases involves no more than applying the law to the facts? First year law students understand within a month that many areas of the law are open textured and indeterminate-that the legal material frequently (actually, I would say always) must be supplemented by contestable presuppositions, empirical assumptions, and moral judgments. To claim otherwise-to claim that fidelity to uncontested legal principles dictates results-is to claim that whenever Justices disagree among themselves, someone is either a fool or acting in bad faith. What does it say about our legal system that in order to get confirmed Judge Sotomayor must tell the lies that she told today? That judges and justices must live these lies throughout their professional careers?
Perhaps Justice Sotomayor should be excused because our official ideology about judging is so degraded that she would sacrifice a position on the Supreme Court if she told the truth. Legal academics who defend what she did today have no such excuse. They should be ashamed of themselves.
Boohoo. Ouch.
Rubin continues:
Many of Sotomayor’s misstatements were blatant and easily revealed. For example, Sotomayor testified on Tuesday in explaining her “wise Latina” speech that she had agreed with Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, who expressed the view that a wise old woman and wise old man would reach the same decision in deciding cases. In fact, Sotomayor said the opposite:
Whether born from experience or inherent physiological or cultural differences, a possibility I abhor less or discount less than my colleague Judge Cedarbaum, our gender and national origins may and will make a difference in our judging. Justice [Sandra Day] O’Connor has often been cited as saying that a wise old man and wise old woman will reach the same conclusion in deciding cases. I am not so sure Justice O’Connor is the author of that line since Professor Resnik attributes that line to Supreme Court Justice Coyle. I am also not so sure that I agree with the statement. First, as Professor Martha Minnow has noted, there can never be a universal definition of wise. Second, I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.
Wow, she lies like Barry saying the stimulus was going to keep unemployment below 9.5%! Gee, I guess she could be a Democrat nominee for President, as these verbal excrements seem right up there with Bubba and Barry himself.
But wait, the excuse making and attempts to reinvent the racist remark continue here:
She also testified that her speech was intended to be instructive about the need to put bias aside. But that was hardly what she had said. Instead, she told the audience in 2001:
While recognizing the potential effect of individual experiences on perception, Judge Cedarbaum nevertheless believes that judges must transcend their personal sympathies and prejudices and aspire to achieve a greater degree of fairness and integrity based on the reason of law. Although I agree with and attempt to work toward Judge Cedarbaum’s aspiration, I wonder whether achieving that goal is possible in all or even in most cases. And I wonder whether by ignoring our differences as women or men of color we do a disservice both to the law and society. Whatever the reasons why we may have different perspectives, either as some theorists suggest because of our cultural experiences or as others postulate because we have basic differences in logic and reasoning, are in many respects a small part of a larger practical question we as women and minority judges in society in general must address. I accept the thesis of a law school classmate, Professor Stephen Carter of Yale Law School, in his affirmative action book that in any group of human beings there is a diversity of opinion because there is both a diversity of experiences and of thought. … Professor Judith Resnik says that there is not a single voice of feminism, not a feminist approach but many who are exploring the possible ways of being that are distinct from those structured in a world dominated by the power and words of men. Thus, feminist theories of judging are in the midst of creation and are not and perhaps will never aspire to be as solidified as the established legal doctrines of judging can sometimes appear to be.
That same point can be made with respect to people of color. No one person, judge or nominee will speak in a female or people of color voice. I need not remind you that Justice Clarence Thomas represents a part but not the whole of African-American thought on many subjects. Yet, because I accept the proposition that, as Judge Resnik describes it, “to judge is an exercise of power” and because as, another former law school classmate, Professor Martha Minnow of Harvard Law School, states “there is no objective stance but only a series of perspectives–no neutrality, no escape from choice in judging,” I further accept that our experiences as women and people of color affect our decisions. The aspiration to impartiality is just that–it’s an aspiration because it denies the fact that we are by our experiences making different choices than others. Not all women or people of color, in all or some circumstances or indeed in any particular case or circumstance but enough people of color in enough cases, will make a difference in the process of judging. The Minnesota Supreme Court has given an example of this. As reported by Judge Patricia Wald formerly of the D.C. Circuit Court, three women on the Minnesota Court with two men dissenting agreed to grant a protective order against a father’s visitation rights when the father abused his child. The Judicature Journal has at least two excellent studies on how women on the courts of appeal and state supreme courts have tended to vote more often than their male counterpart to uphold women’s claims in sex discrimination cases and criminal defendants’ claims in search and seizure cases. As recognized by legal scholars, whatever the reason, not one woman or person of color in any one position but as a group we will have an effect on the development of the law and on judging.
Plainly hers was a call to bring ethnic and gender bias to the bench.
Aw, Snap!
And that whole raising money for pro-abort groups? Well...uh....it all depends on...:
Sotomayor was also asked by Sen. Lindsay Graham about her work for PRLDEF and its left-wing agenda, including advocacy of taxpayer-funded abortions. She declared that she had never read the briefs and was primarily a fundraiser on the board. Many news reports and direct witnesses tell a different story. The New York Times reported:
“She just believed in the mission,” Luis Alvarez, a former chairman of its board, said of Ms. Sotomayor. “This was a highly refined group of individuals who came from the premier academic institutions. It was almost like Camelot. It was a wonderful growth period.”
But Ms. Sotomayor stood out, frequently meeting with the legal staff to review the status of cases, several former members said. And so across her 12 years on the board — she left when she was appointed a federal judge in 1992 — she played an active role as the defense fund staked out aggressive stances on issues like police brutality, the death penalty and voting rights.
The board monitored all litigation undertaken by the fund’s lawyers, and a number of those lawyers said Ms. Sotomayor was an involved and ardent supporter of their various legal efforts during her time with the group.
Check out the rest of the article for the twisting and turning of what this woman may or may not have ever thought. What we are left with is an incoherent, babbling, racist, dishonest woman who thinks ethnicity and gender should be taken into account when making decisions and who thinks she is morally and intellectually superior to others because of race and gender. Gee, she would fit in with the racism of Justice Hugo Black, member of the KKK. I wonder how active Sappy Sonia was in la Raza and if she supported those terrorists Hillary Clinton got pardoned back in the day?
For more great insight, check out Roger Kimball's article.
